Miss Williams Wynn is today telling the elaborate, dramatic tale of a conman who passed himself off as the Archduke John, brother of the Emperor of Austria across half of Europe.

He starts out with the British Consul at Jaffa, travels around various convents, to the “Turkish ports”, on to Hamburg and is finally wrecked (on his way to America – where you get the feeling he would have done rather well) off the coast of Britain.

Says Miss Williams Wynn:

The conman escapes again, however, by seducing the wife of his jailer. The young lad travelling with him, son of the consul, is saved by a kindly judge “the only one man in the whole world who would not have hanged him because he had been imposed upon by a rascal.”

The whole story does have a very novelist feel, but who knows? It might be true.

Anyone looking for a story for a movie, this has definite possibilities!

One of the best summaries and explanations of the current unrest that I’ve read is on Dangereuse Trilingue.

“Well, and then “foutre le bordel” (“creating a disruptive mess” or “fucking up everything”, take your pick for a translation) is in a way a rather French response to social dissatisfaction. However deplorable, however inexcusable, this is not the first time in history this sort of thing has happened.”

Which echoes my thoughts. This sort of political violence (broadly very controlled – the targets have almost entirely been property rather than persons, and the one death may have related to a pre-existing grudge rather than the events themselves) is pretty well a French tradition – farmers, anti-globalisation protesters, unionists often engage in similar, if slightly more formal “protests”.

Who says the young inhabitants of the banlieues have been inadequately assimilated into French culture?

As for the foreign media coverage, you have to remember that a burning car is just about an irresistible image to a sub-editor looking for an image for a colour page (and I should imagine for a television editor). These are the sorts of things that can have an enormous impact on how the news is reported.

Julie Birchill is being typically inflammatory on the subject of children today in The Times.

She’s often obviously writing for effect rather than from conviction, but she does have a way of striking deep to the heart of an issue.

She’s also being upset in this article about historians speaking about their subject in the current tense. I hadn’t noticed it; has anyone else?

As a small celebration – after last night’s lively communal work leaving party – I’m cooking myself tonight a slap-up baked chicken with all the trimmings. (It has taken me years to get over my early journalism experience – of endless rubber chicken dinners with tinned peas, as served up by the “women’s auxiliary” of whatever organisation was conducting the evening – but I can now almost face the idea of the dish again.)

The choice was made by the fact of the local Sainsbury having their “best quality” free-range chicken, from an identified farm, promising treed-pastures, at half price.

I’m increasingly trying to buy only meat from really decent sources, particularly regarding animal welfare. I saw some horrible things in my agricultural science days, but must admit that I’ve only really thought about them, and acted on those thought, in recent years.

So I was taken by this week’s Times Literary Supplement article about Factory farm ethics – a review of several books, including Peter Singer’s revised opus.

The wide-ranging history of human-animal relations – Hunters, Herders, Hamburgers:
The past and future of human-animal relationships by Richard W. Bulliet – sounds particularly interesting.

Well it looks as though (if the young men of Monrovia allow it) Africa has its first elected female president – Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf of Liberia.

With good timing, I stumbled across an article I wrote many years ago for Thailand Metro (it must have been 1991 or 1992) about Khunying Supatra Masdit, then billed as the woman most likely to become “Thailand’s first female Prime Minister”.

She’s still in the international women’s rights movement, but unfortunately the political trend in Thailand has not been her way in recent years.

I was struck by some of the quotes, and her careful denial of “feminist” credentials.

“I hope that in my lifetime I’ll see it [a female Thai Prime Minister]. In 1979 the people would have laughed at the idea, but now they would accept a woman leader if she was good enough. …

“It is not that males in power were to blame for deliberately obstructing women’s advancement,” she says. “that just didn’t understand.”

She is determined to stress, however, that her political success was built on a foundation laid by the hard but apparently unrewarded work of other women. “When I was the minister I was the midwife, delivering on all their hard work, but instead of nine months the gestation period was ten years.

“Are you a feminist?” is an inevitable question for any women in a position of power. Khunying Supatra finds it a difficult one to answer because the term sometimes suggests a woman who wants to exclude men, something that doesn’t fit in with her views. “You can’t change anything without men – it’s a man’s world,” Khunying Supatra says with a laugh.

Sadly, however, from what I know of Thailand, Khunying Supatra is still far from any hope of real power – partly because she’s female, and partly because of a distinctly authoritarian trend in the political landscape.

… even in the archives.

That was the message of an excellent “masterclass” I went to at the Centre for Lives and Letters this week.

(I’ve never heard of the format, but it involved the teacher, the biographer Stella Tillyard, giving the tutorial class to a small group of students, while about 50 of us watched. (Rather hard on the students, but they loosened up by the end.)

We started with a handwritten letter, read it out and deduced what it was about. It was a pleading letter in which a queen begs her husband, the king, to allow her to defend herself against calumnies, and the charges she is obviously facing.

We were given the background – this is Queen Caroline Matilda of Denmark, the younger sister of George III, who’d gone there to be married at the age of 16 to Christian VII, who was already suffering a severe mental illness. The scandalous eventual results, which fascinated Europe of the time, are recorded here.

But years later, when her son at the age of just 16 seized the throne, he ordered all papers about his mother (he’d last seen her at the age of three) gathered together into a secret archive, Papers Concerning the King’s Mother. Which was where this letter came in.

We then looked at a contemporary memoir published in London within a year or two of her death, actually an epistolary novel whipped up by some Fleet Street hack. (As they say, there’s nothing new in the world.) It was very successful, and went into several editions.

But what was surprising is that here was the letter, very nearly identical letter, yet how could the hack have got hold of it? The answer was he (I guess it was a he, although of course it might not have been) , of course made it up.

But when the young king was ordering papers about his mother collected, some Danish diplomat, whether honestly or desperately, had collected this “letter”, written it out in his own hand, and hence, there it was in the archive.

It was a powerful lesson not to believe everything you read, even in a handwritten archive of the right age.

(The theoretical background was Carolyn Steedman’s Dust, which I keep encountering in various areas; it has now leapt up the “must read” list.)

History, Biography